The Seven Year Itch (1955)

Directed by Billy Wilder. Starring Tom Ewell, Marilyn Monroe, Evelyn Keyes, Robert Strauss, Sonny Tufts, Oscar Homolka, Donald MacBride, Marguerite Chapman.

After the wife and kid take a lengthy summer sojourn out of town, docile, middle-aged Ewell souses himself in fantasies of other women, especially the blonde bombshell (Monroe) that moved in upstairs. Wilder’s comedy, adapted from George Axelrod’s play and focusing on the habit of married men’s eyes restlessly wandering seven years or so after tying the knot, is a total dud; not merely badly dated and neutered by the Hays code, but tediously unfunny from start to finish. Ewell, playing a Walter Mitty-esque drip who talks to himself at length (it may have worked okay on stage, but definitely not on screen), is about as interesting as the bag of potato chips shared alongside a bottle of champagne. Marilyn, meanwhile, may be easy on the eyes but she’s also a burden on the brain since she’s such a vacuous screen partner (she’s constantly staring off into space, as if reading her lines from a cue card, and considering how notorious she was as an actress to forget her dialogue, this may very well be the case). This is the one where Monroe steps onto a subway grate and gets a rush of air up her billowing white dress; has a more iconic scene ever appeared in such an otherwise disposable turkey?

37/100